Aqua Security Predicts Churn with 95% Accuracy, Thanks to Staircase AI

Aqua Security, the pioneer in cloud native security, was struggling to assess customer health and prevent churn. They leveraged Staircase AI to improve the accuracy of their health score and the precision of their forecasting, making their CS process more dynamic and proactive while improving gross revenue retention (GRR).

Renato Mirabal, Business Operations Manager at Aqua Security, supports the company’s Go-to-Market, Sales, and Customer Success teams. He explained the customer success challenge they were facing:

“We wanted to redo our health score because it was very subjective—it was mainly based on how a CSM [customer success manager] felt about an account,” Mirabal said. “Our health score wasn’t a good indicator of churn risk—we were losing accounts that were greener than the grass in Texas.”

Mirabal knew they needed to make a change. He started with an analysis of all the accounts that had churned over the previous two years. That helped him identify several objective metrics of engagement that were accurate predictors of churn:

• License utilization
• Number of tickets created per 60 days, based on customer tier
• Number of bugs and escalations

But even with that information, their health score was still not accurate enough. They needed even more data, and Staircase AI provided the deeper insights they needed to make a real impact on churn.

Staircase AI analyzes customer signals to create a clearer, more holistic picture of customer health. Aqua leveraged AI-powered insights from Staircase to overhaul their health score. Mirabal and his team developed a data-driven model that blended a range of objective indicators.

They started with their own metrics, then added Staircase’s out-of-the-box health score configuration, which is weighted as follows: 40% engagement, 35% sentiment, 15% response times to support requests, and 10% open support items. Staircase also integrates with their ticketing system, email, and other activities, which contributes to the health score.

“We decided to add Staircase’s analysis into our existing equation—we made it 20% of the value of our health score—and see what happened,” Mirabal said.

Mirabal soon had an opportunity to test the validity of their new score when a prominent customer indicated red, ie, high churn risk, but the account’s CSM had rated it green. A week later, the customer churned.

“I’m not saying the health score is perfect. But it is a strong, data-driven indicator of customer health.”

Once Staircase had proven its value in health scoring, they expanded the use of the technology across CS operations, informing prioritization, coaching, productivity tracking, and forecasting.

Aqua integrated Staircase with their customer success platform to power automated alerts and dashboards. They discovered that adding meeting summary data further sharpened sentiment scoring, making the overall model even more accurate over time.

Real-time alerts and account summaries from Staircase helped CS leaders coach teams more effectively, prioritize accounts based on renewal timing and health, and proactively prevent customer churn.

“Staircase has become a coaching tool for us,” Mirabal said. “When an account is at risk of churn, they get notifications from Staircase, and they also get a Staircase account summary that helps them understand what’s going on with an account—at a glance.”

Staircase has changed the dynamic in terms of which accounts they need to focus on for upcoming renewals. “Staircase helps us prioritize a lot of the things that the teams are doing now is managing and coaching their teams based on the information,” said Mirabal.

They recently implemented meeting recording summaries, which is now baked into the score and changes the sentiment metric. “That has been a bit of an improvement as well. The more data that we feed into the system, the more accurate the score becomes.”

Integrating insights from Staircase AI into their health score led to a 95% accuracy rate in identifying accounts at risk of churn.

The improved health score also made their forecasting more accurate. Aqua saw its forecasting margin of error shrink from 40% to under 5%. This sharper vision of the future helped gain alignment between CS and Sales when discussing renewals and business objectives.

“Thanks to Staircase, we have a better health score and a better ability to prevent fires,” Mirabal said. “We’re never going to be perfect, right? But a 5% margin of error versus 40%—that’s pretty sweet.”

By transforming its health score with Staircase AI, Aqua Security didn’t just prevent churn—it built a more proactive, data-driven Customer Success team that drives lasting customer relationships and revenue growth. As they continue to refine their model and feed in more data, they’re building a powerful, future-ready Customer Success function—one that every CS team can learn from.